Tuesday, December 11, 2012

"... It’s all about “who’s to blame for a disastrous policy,” not genuine strategic revision. The United States isn’t going to give up arming rebels—even jihadists—fighting to overthrow governments it doesn’t like. For, Hillary explains, there is “something deeply cultural, something deep in American strategic culture” that leads one generation of policymakers after another to believe “that no matter who we arm, train, and fund, as long as they knock off the political order that we don’t like, that is defying the United States, that somehow organically the population will rise up and construct a liberal, secular political order. Notwithstanding the fact that the fighters are jihadists, they will construct a liberal secular political order. We have this delusion time and time again, and I think it’s something deeply embedded in American strategic culture.” And the growing impact of money from Arab states in the Persian Gulf makes it “increasingly difficult to question what some of our friends are doing,” in Syria and elsewhere...."